Getting ready for Christmas, Celebrating Christmas, and then enjoying post Christmas, I realized I really needed to do some racking and make some notes about the wines I have pre-bottling stage.

First things first, I decided to bottle an Australian Shiraz that I started over 9 weeks ago. It was a Cru Select premium kit that has been sitting for awhile, and looked quite clear. So after sanitizing 3o bottles, and soaking corks in a sulphite solution, that was the first order of business. A mouthful of the Shiraz was of course met with “youthful” wine taste, but definitely Shiraz-y. I’ll be setting this wine down to age even longer in the basement after the bottles are labelled tomorrow.

Bottling the Shiraz made a little bit of extra space in my cubbyhole of a home winery, and the next thing on my agenda was to rack the garlic wine. The SG of the garlic wine was 1.004 – still a little fermenting to go. This sure smelled like garlic too. There’s going to be no mistaking the primary ingredient in this one.

After the garlic, and running hot water through my syphon and racking tube for about ten minutes to ensure there was no lingering garlic, I racked a Vieux-Chateau Du Roi, added a 1/4 teaspoon of sulphite, and have marked this for bottling later this week.

The five gallon carboy of blueberry wine that I started in November was staring at me, with lees on the bottom. The specific gravity of this was 0.990 and it was racked into a freshly sanitized carboy.

Next was the blackcurrant. This is an interesting one – it’s still showing signs of fermentation after being started a month ago, and the specific gravity was 1.010 – I’ll have to watch this to ensure that fermentation really is continuing, and if not, try and restart it. But it was racked off the lees as well.

Next up was blackberry wine. This wine has a brilliant cranberry red colour, similar to the blueberry we enjoyed on Christmas day, but there remains a bit of berry matter in the wine. The specific gavity of the blackberry wine was recorded at 0.992 – so I after racking, added a 1/4 teaspoon of sulphite, and I’ll let this age for another few months before racking again.

Finally, and loosely following the instructions of the Wine Kitz kit that I’m reviewing, which called for racking on day 28 (this was actually day 41), I recorded the specific gravity at 0.098 (the instructions suggest 0.0995), racked, added the package of mixed sulphite and potassium sorbate along with a packet of Kieselsol. The Wine Kitz instructions now direct that I stir this “for three minute intervals at least six times” over the next 24 hours before adding Chitosan and topping up.

I still haven’t started any of the meads that I was planning – just have run out of time recently. But hopefully before the end of the week, I’ll have some of those started.

Oh, as a final note for the day, don’t ever bother using conglomerate cork. It sucks.

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